Where climate change threatens survival

THE idea of government ministers donning scuba gear to attend an underwater cabinet meeting seems to conjure up a scene from surrealist drama, but in the tiny Indian Ocean republic of the Maldives it really happened. In 2009 President Mohamed Nasheed and his cabinet did just that to draw attention to the fact that their country might literally disappear beneath the waves. The highest point on the 1200 islands that make up the Maldives is only 2.4 metres above sea level, and 80 per cent of the total land mass of the islands is only a metre above it. If the sea level rises by 59 centimetres in the course of the century - the upper limit predicted in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2007 report - most of the republic's 200 inhabited islands will have to be abandoned.

Rising sea levels are one of the key indicators of human-induced global warming, which is perhaps why skeptics contest the evidence for it so vigorously, typically by cherry-picking from variable data or disputing the reliability of tidal gauges. But the inhabitants of the Maldives, and of other low-lying island states such as Tuvalu and Kiribati in the Pacific, have no doubt that the IPCC's predictions are a pointer to their future. They do not need gauges and graphs to know that the sea is rising. In the Maldives, about three islands a year are submerged and 14 once-inhabited islands have already been abandoned. On more than a third of the inhabited islands, drinking water has to be desalinated because the sea has inundated groundwater aquifers.

Australians tend to think about the Maldives, Tuvalu and Kiribati, if they think about them at all, as paradisal holiday destinations. They are only a convenient flight away, and not so crowded with fellow tourists as Bali. The islands' proximity, however, is a reminder that the threat to the low-lying states' existence is not only a problem for the islanders themselves. If the Maldives were to vanish, for example, their 350,000 human inhabitants would have to go somewhere. And the nations that ring the Indian Ocean, such as Australia, Sri Lanka and India, would be their most likely destinations. Australia would be similarly attractive to the peoples of drowning Pacific states. These islanders would not be asylum seekers in the strict sense, because they would not be fleeing persecution. But as victims of a catastrophe not of their making they would certainly have a claim on the rest of humanity. Two of the most divisive issues in Australian politics in the past two decades, climate change and immigration, would have coalesced.

They are issues that have hitherto been mostly debated in a context of fear, whipped up by opportunistic politicians. The successful passage of the carbon-tax legislation, however, is a sign that the fear may be abating, or at least that it will be harder to incite once people see that the tax will not destroy their livelihoods. As President Nasheed noted in an interview with the Saturday Age, the tax is a ''brave move forward''.

Maldivian officials have not always been so complimentary. At last year's UN climate-change conference in Durban, they attacked the so-called Umbrella Group, which includes Australia, the US, Russia and Canada, for obstructing agreement on mandatory emissions cuts. In fact the Durban talks produced a better outcome than had been expected: delegates agreed to begin work on a new global treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol on carbon emissions, to come into force by 2020.

From an Australian perspective, that is modest progress. To Mr Nasheed, 2020 will be too late. He wants world leaders to bring the date forward, but he is also keenly aware that the Maldives, like the other states most at risk of inundation - Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tokelau and the Marshall Islands - lacks diplomatic clout. That may well doom his plea, and ultimately his nation, too. But Australia should remember that our neighbours' interests are also our interests.